The Koch Brothers’ ‘Samson Option’

October 8, 2013

Exclusive: The fiscal crisis in Washington is not simply a threat to economic and government stability, as serious as that is. It is a premeditated scheme to carve out a new constitutional structure that gives the Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires the power to void the democratic process, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires who provoked the government shutdown and now are angling for an even more devastating credit default see themselves as the people who deserve to rule the United States without interference from lesser citizens, especially those with darker-colored skin.

Their “masters of the universe” world view is that they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies were the ones who “built America” and, thus, it’s their right to tear down the remarkable edifice of U.S. law, politics and economics created over the past two-plus centuries — if the country’s less-deserving inhabitants insist on raising taxes on the rich to fund programs benefiting the poor and the middle class.

Oil billionaires David and Charles Koch.

That is what we’re watching now, what might be called the Koch Brothers’ “Samson Option,” pulling down the temple to destroy their enemies even if doing so is also destructive to them and their fortunes.

Charles and David Koch and other right-wing billionaires and near-billionaires are blind with anger after wasting millions of dollars on Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and the Republican Party in a failed attempt to defeat Barack Obama, the Democrats and health-care reform. These were the guys who smirked knowingly when Romney sneered at “the 47 percent” of Americans who receive some government help; they got snappish when Obama called them “fat cats”; they demanded the honorific title of “job creators.”

Then, they had to sit in their plush party rooms waiting to celebrate Romney’s victory only to be frustrated by a coalition of voters led by African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites who are comfortable in a more diverse country.

Despite all the money and electoral tricks, the Koch Brothers and friends failed to block the reelection of the first African-American president; they watched the Democrats defy the odds and retain the Senate; and they barely managed to hold onto a slender Republican House “majority” through aggressive gerrymandering and other anti-democratic anomalies that overcame the GOP’s loss in the popular vote of about 1½ million ballots.

To make matters worse, these rich white guys had to listen to endless commentary about the coming demographic changes and the need for Republicans to improve their image with racial and ethnic minorities. Through a blinding rage, the Right’s billionaires plotted revenge.

Plotting Obama’s Downfall

Of course, many pragmatic rich folk understand how the extraordinary U.S. system built by the sweat and ingenuity of countless “average Americans” and protected by the blood of heroic common citizens has made their fortunes possible. These patriotic multi-millionaires cringe at the spectacle of a U.S. government shutdown and panic at the thought of defaulting on U.S. debt.

But the right-wing billionaires and their political front groups welcome the current chaos. Indeed, they began planning today’s fiscal crisis as soon as their stunning defeat of last November sank in. Rather than behave as a loyal opposition, the Right started plotting soon after Obama took the oath of office a second time, as the New York Times reported:

“Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.

“Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed ‘blueprint to defunding Obamacare,’ signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups. It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans, including their cautious leaders, into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.

“To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010, waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.

“Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.

“The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.”

The Right also has relied on its well-financed propaganda machine to obscure for millions of Americans what is actually underway in Washington. The curtain on that was lifted briefly on Sunday with the recognition that the Democrats agreed to the budget terms demanded by House Speaker John Boehner, who then double-crossed them.

On TV interview shows, Boehner conceded that he had struck a deal with the Democrats in which the Senate would accept the lower House budget figures, which included the so-called “sequester” cuts, in exchange for passage of a continuing resolution to keep the government going.

Reneging on a Deal

As the Times reported, “the speaker acknowledged that in July he had gone to the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid and offered to have the House pass a clean financing resolution. [Boehner’s] proposal would have set spending levels $70 billion lower than Democrats wanted, but would have no contentious add-ons like changing the health-care law. Democrats accepted, but they say Mr. Boehner then reneged under pressure from Tea Party conservatives.”

So, Boehner had laid out terms for a deal that the Democrats disliked but agreed to accept, only to see Boehner pocket their major concession, tack on a host of new demands including stopping health-care reform, and then berating them with the “talking point” that it was the Democrats who wouldn’t negotiate.

There was also the point that House Republicans had refused for six months to appoint members of a conference committee to hammer out budget differences between the House and Senate.

If not for the powerful right-wing media which continues to repeat the “Democrats won’t negotiate” mantra, the American public would have no doubt who provoked the current crisis. But what’s even more significant is what this right-wing strategy means to the future of American democracy.

The position of the Koch Brothers and other right-wing plutocrats is that democracy itself is the problem. It’s bad enough that they have to listen to views that they disagree with; they certainly shouldn’t have to sit back and watch these lesser beings elect leaders and enact policies that involve raising taxes on the rich to provide benefits to other Americans.

While reflective of “free-market” extremism, this right-wing view also has a racial component, since the Right’s billionaires have relied on Tea Party foot soldiers to fight these political wars and many of those white populist right-wingers are attracted by neo-Confederate ideology, i.e. the supposed “rights” of states to ignore federal mandates, especially those designed to help blacks, Hispanics and other minorities.

“States’ rights” have had a long and grim history in the United States, touted from the early years of the Republic as necessary to defend slavery, then leading to the Civil War and to a near-century of Jim Crow racial segregation.

After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, opportunistic Republicans, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw their chance to snatch the South by playing to white resentment against integration. So, they played up their commitment to “states’ rights” and were rewarded by switching the Deep South from the Democrats to the GOP.

Danger of Fair Elections

Today, however, the Right fears that the nation’s demographic changes could mean that fair elections would end frequently with the selection of candidates who favor stronger federal action to address problems confronting the nation and the world, from the economic risk posed by the concentration of wealth in the top one percent to the existential threat posed by global warming.

An energetic federal government is needed to address these challenges. If the Great American Middle Class is to survive, Congress will have to raise taxes on the rich and invest that money in national infrastructure, cutting-edge research, affordable education, expanded health care and other domestic programs. If global warming is to be slowed and eventually reversed, the federal government must move quickly to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions while revamping the U.S. energy system.

But the Right wants to prevent such government activism. So, it has developed strategies to give more weight to the votes of white Republicans and less weight to the votes of blacks, Hispanics and other groups that tend to go Democratic. That’s why organizations supported by the Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires have backed Republican efforts to impose strict voter ID laws, reduce voting hours and aggressively gerrymander congressional districts to lump Democratic votes in one while ensuring solid Republican majorities in others.

The Right is implementing a strategy as old as the southern poll tax and literacy tests for blacks, i.e. the need to negate post-Civil War amendments that guaranteed equal rights under the law and the right to vote regardless of the color of a person’s skin.

Today’s right-wing strategy follows the thinking of urbane conservative William F. Buckley, who explained in 1957 when Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were agitating for enforcement of post-Civil War provisions that “The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”

Now the Buckley doctrine is being applied nationwide. But the problem for the Right is that even with all the voter suppression and shorter voting hours creating nightmarish lines especially in minority neighborhoods, the American people still reelected Barack Obama and favored Democrats over Republicans for Congress.

Thanks to gerrymandering and other anti-democratic moves, the Right still has a tenuous foothold through its control of the House and can count on the Senate GOP minority to filibuster nearly everything.

However, for the Right to have the power to implement policies of its choice, a new strategy was needed. It surfaced first in 2011 with the threat to default on the nation’s debt, which coerced President Obama into accepting severe cuts in federal spending, called the “sequester.”

Now, in 2013, the Republican Right has doubled down on that strategy, merging a government shutdown with an impending credit default in an effort to extort more concessions from Obama and the Democrats. But the larger goal is to create a new constitutional structure in which the Right, regardless of its minority status, gets to dictate what the federal government can and cannot do.

To make this strategy work, however, requires a readiness to play Samson and to pull down the temple on your enemies as well as yourself. That appears to be the extreme option that the Koch Brothers and their fellow right-wing billionaires have chosen. If they can’t rule America, they will reduce the country to economic rubble through a fiscal crisis and a premeditated financial collapse.

Then, perhaps out of the rubble, a chastened American people will emerge to accept their subordinate position in this new plutocratic structure. In the future, they will know better than to do something that the Koch Brothers and their right-wing friends don’t like.

All that stuff about a government of the people, by the people and for the people will finally have perished from the earth. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Government by Extortion.”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

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26 comments for “The Koch Brothers’ ‘Samson Option’”

Jym Allyn

October 10, 2013 at 17:46

Why has no one suggested a boycott of Koch owned consumer products such as those produced by Georgia-Pacific?

butch butch

October 9, 2013 at 20:31

all our congressmen and senators should not be able to speak without us knowing who are the top 5 contributing
factions in their elections, put it below in a banner on TV. Then you might get what is going on.
Butch

rosemerry

October 9, 2013 at 02:14

The Repugs are terrible, but the Dems, especially Obama, let them do it because they agree. Real voters are of no importance. How anyone can support such “democracy” is beyond belief.

jerome irwin

October 8, 2013 at 21:08

Obama and all his Demothuglicans, as well as the Koc Brothers and their Rethuglicans are all in this together, up to their eyeballs. Otherwise, the whoe charade could be ended in the same way that the banks were bailed out during the hijacking of the Federal Reserve and the fleecing of the American public. THis is just Phase Two of the Plutocrats master plan to completely co-opt, and drive the last spike into the heart of the American Democratic system as it originally was conceived.

If Obama wasn’t on their side, and intended to champion the survival of the American REpublic system of government he could end this whole business by simply issuing the ultimate challenge to the Koch Brothers and their ilk by playing the ultimate game of chicken with them. The Game would go like this, “Okay I’ve had enough of this thuggery against the American people and the Republic, so I’m going to declare that as of tomorrow not just essential services are to be suspended but the entire government will cease to operate as of tomorrow morning. We will shut the whole kit and kaboodle down and let the Rethuglicans, the Koch Brothers and all the rest deal with the American people directly.”

But of course Obama doesn’t have the balls to do something so daring nor does he have the inclination because he is one of them and it would be not only political suicide but literallly physical suicide because he would immediately be assassinated.

John D'oh

October 10, 2013 at 10:46

Obama is one of them, or a hostage to them?

Bob Jacobson

October 8, 2013 at 20:37

The last time I encountered Ed Meese, that tub of lard, he was pulling off a duplicitous sting in the California Legislature hoping to entrap friends of then-Speaker Willie Brown, Jr. This was while Meese was Attorney General under Reagan, another nasty character, Bert Gross’ archetypal “Friendly Face of Fascism.” Meese totally blew the operation, entrapping his friends and a couple random crooks (and one very honest citizen, a true patriot, whose name I will not reveal). His fatuous comments on the occasion of this faux pas were memorable only as an epitaph to his reign as Lawbreaker-General. It’s not surprising at all that he’s behind the current terrorizing of the nation via the dupes in the House. Nor is it surprising that his strategy is failing and benefiting the Good Guys. That’s ED MEESE all over again, in capital letters. We should be glad to have such idiots making policy for the reactionaries, who don’t have a clue how to successfully invest their billions. Those Kochs are such rubes, albeit with big pocketbooks. All the better for the professional pickpockets on the right to fleece them. Or didn’t they even consider the possibility?

The current Congressional crisis is being masterminded by a faction which resembles the KKK minus only the white sheets and hoods. Local ordinances keep them from burning crosses, but for how long nobody knows. Financing is provided by the Koch brothers and spiritual guidance comes from Jim DeMint and the Heritage Foundation. Ted Cruz provides the public image. Given their “Southern Strategy” ideological affinities, they certainly could use a new moniker which befits their political orientation. I put on my ‘thinking cap’ and came up with a few.

Maybe other readers could contribute some ideas. These people certainly need all the help they can get. My personal favorite is KleptoKochKracy, but who am I to judge? Maybe one inspired by the Nixon era would be better: KREEPS, Koch’s Republicans for Elimination of Equality in Society!

F. G. Sanford

October 8, 2013 at 17:36

That last line should say, “Koch’s Republicans for Elimination of Equality in Polite Society”.

fosforos

October 8, 2013 at 18:51

This phony crisis is the work of Obama, nobody else. The stupid Kochses, Teapartiers, et. al., are his unwitting catspaws in setting up the public, the media, the congressional dumbocrats for his Grand Bargain cuts to Social Security and Medicare plus additional “austerity” atrocities, all justified by the Horrible Debt. You are falling all over yourselves to help him sell this poison.

The realities are:
1) The level of public debt is economically irrelevant because the US (unlike France or Spain) is monetarily sovereign and so can finance, (whether by taxation or additional domestic debt or by currency issue) whatever level of public spending is needed to ensure full employment without inflation.
2) The president has total legal power to mint platinum coinage of any denomination sufficient to increase the Treasury account at the Federal Reserve (which is legally required to credit the Treasury with the face value of all its deposits) enough to pay all Federal obligations in cash and even to reduce the nominal debt to zero.
3) The president is legally required (by the Fourteenth Amendment) not to default on any Federal obligation. To do so would be absolute grounds for impeachment and removal from office.

Therefore Obama could put an end to all this nonsense simply by declaring that, whatever Congress does or does not do about the phony “debt limit,” he will use his statutory authority to comply with his constitutional duty and that every debt owed by the government will be paid in full and on time. Since he is neither idiotic nor totally incompetent there can be no doubt that the whole charade is what I described at the outset: a softening-up process for his administration-long campaign to cut social security and medicare and impose EU-type austerity on the American people. Yowling about Kochses and Teapartiers does nothing but bring more water to his Satanic mill.

j malcolm

October 8, 2013 at 19:32

In other countries these people would be arrested for treason.

Bob Jacobson

October 8, 2013 at 20:40

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, with Obamacare seguing so smoothly into national default.

DaveR

October 9, 2013 at 09:31

Arrest them for questioning the full faith and credit of the United States, an act specifically forbidden by the Constitution.

John D'oh

October 10, 2013 at 10:42

It’s as simple as that.

Eric Bischoff

October 8, 2013 at 16:24

The Koch family made its fortune in oil in the USSR and now here in US with coal and gas. I don’t believe the American people will let these racist bigot jerks bring this country down. Sooner or later they will be stopped. So what country do you suppose they will run to next!

John Kuchar

October 9, 2013 at 09:56

Our Prime Minister fits right in with those crooks ,only he has run mad in his dictatorship. We need a minority government preferably not conservative. We want our country back.

Dan

October 8, 2013 at 16:19

This exactly what they’re trying to do, and why they started the Tea Party movement. http://wp.me/pNmlT-Nt

John Kuchar

October 9, 2013 at 09:54

Don’t send them to Canada our Prime Minister is an out of control Republican Dictator. Those guys could buy him for a couple million in his off shore account.

incontinent reader

October 8, 2013 at 15:44

Their strategy to hijack the government, change the legal and political system and control the nation’s resources also includes the introduction of supranational trade agreements such as the TPP and the TTIP.

I hope someone will be able to fund a master directory of every company and every top management executive that are involved in this agenda- and then release it on the internet so that it can go viral. The people need to know who is doing it and how, and where they live and work. Best to get it out in the open so that the 99% know who is responsible and can fight back to keep them accountable.

REDPILLED

October 8, 2013 at 16:15

Too oe-sided. Obama is pushing the TPP & European Trade aggreements along with many corporate Democrats. Since Bill Clinton, Dems have also become Wall Street & Corporate whores, not only Rethuglicans. Clinton not only destroyed welfare, but repealed Glass-Steagall, paving the way for the 2008 economic collapse.

If Obama were truly on the side of the middle class & poor, he never would consider putting Social Security & Medicare on the table, which he did as soon as he entered office in 2009.

That reckless move (his Catfood Commission) only emboldened the reactionaries dreaming of finally destroying what is left of the New Deal & Great Society.

Obama is not the liberal/progressive politician that too many people believe. Our Social Safety Net is one of the things that makes our country great, and to even mention that they might be negotiable was a major sign of Obama’s negotiating with himself again.

As for TPP–that should be on everyone’s tongues. Too many distractions caused by the 1% in Congress are distracting people from too many attacks from too many places by the ALEC/Koch/AFP Cabal of extreme right wing pro-corporate wealthy conservatives willing to spend it to show they have more power than the government.

Let’s hope I’m wrong and they are not more powerful than our government–although, they are much of the government.

madame de farge

October 9, 2013 at 07:26

and then they are going to tell you again, that the American worker is lazy, that they don’t deserve healthcare or the SS that they PAID FOR EVERY YEAR with a regressive tax and they shure as shugar do not deserve respect….